There was a lot of Apple news last week and most of the attention was focused, understandably on OS X Lion, the new MacBook Air, and on the Mac mini. Also, the company’s LED Cinema display became the Thunderbolt display, Apple’s top-of-the-line 27-inch offering. Still priced at a hefty $999 the addition of Thunderbolt to the display didn’t seem like a particularly big deal, but there was more to this update than a move to a different input.

The things to know about the new Thunderbolt display is that it has three USB 2.0 ports, FireWire 800, ethernet, and a Thunderbolt port on-board. That’s a pretty extensive setup for a monitor, a peripheral that usually, at best, has a card reader built-in. Also it will only work with a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac.

And that’s when things get interesting–Thunderbolt is a two-way 10Gb/s (very fast connection) which means that while the computer is outputting to the display it can take in high-speed internet and USB (etc.). Then peripherals can be daisy-chained to the monitor, which means that additional displays, storage, and other devices can be added on.

The display get’s really interesting when combined with the MacBook Air, a computer that has been dinged for not having enough I/O ports. But now if you use the computer’s single Thunderbolt port to connect to Apple’s display you’ll have a full-fledged system, practically an iMac or MacBook Pro. Unfortunately you’ll still be a bit short on graphics power as Apple didn’t include graphics in the dock, like Sony did with the new Vaio Z laptop, but just about about everything else is taken care of.

The use of external graphics combined with the Air’s Core i5/i7 processing could have been really impressive and would have helped justify the price of the display, but it’s wasn’t in the cards just yet. The inclusion of graphics would also help out the new Mac mini, but wouldn’t be much help for MacBook Pro owners less if the external graphics could override or combine with the laptop’s discrete solution.

As a related issue, it’s been pointed out that the Thunderbolt display’s capabilities means that it would be possible for Apple to ditch the expensive LCD panel and simply turn the guts of the product into a converter or dock for Thunderbolt. It could be substantially cheaper than the display version and it could make the MacBook’s slightly more business friendly (because business buyers love docks, even if they don’t love OS X).

So what Apple did was make a better display for their notebooks. To do this they make a (somewhat) bold move by not allowing it to work with non-Thunderbolt computers, including older MacBooks. Ultimately it’s a rather expensive solution to a problem, but users should find it to be a nice combination of portability and desktop power. Apple probably won’t ever include a Thunderbolt display with on-board graphics (it doesn’t seem very Apple-y does it?) but Thunderbolt/Light Peak can do it and the change could make the MacBook Air a viable system for many more people.

Speak Your Mind

http://www.frontsidebus.net David – Front Side Bus

I like the idea of having additional ports on a display. I would really like to see a small expansion dock go on sale though so you can still take advantage of thunderbolt without having to get a display with a hefty $999 price tag attached.

Mike95

Does it work when booting into bootcamp like the cinema display does??

Anonymous

So if, instead of paying an obscene amount of money for your PC, you pay an asinine amount for it and a big display, you get a lot of ports!

Michael

Actually, for a few hundred dollars more, you might as well get the iMac. It gives you faster processor, awesome graphics, and you can still plug your MacBook Air into it – you can even run it as an external monitor. But far better is to just connect the MBA as an external disk using Target Disk mode, and run a simple Folder Sync app that updates everything between the two computers. Then you can grab our MBA and run catch that flight, and have everything back in sync when you get home.

Notes:

1) This syncing will be done by iCloud anyhow, in the near future.

2) The advantage of the Thunderbolt cable is really only if you need to offload 100GB or more of photos – which I do quite often, so I’m looking forward to the combination…

http://twitter.com/dirk_s dirk_s

Is there any chance for 3rd party vendors to step in and develop thunderbolt supported docks? Or is this Apple proprietary technology?

Pjmpete

All the images and specs I’ve seen only show a single thunderbolt port on this display.
Given that, how can you daisy chain between 2 devices that only have a single thunderbolt port each? At least one (the display) should have a second thunderbolt port.

Am I missing the 2nd thunderbolt port?

Otherwise very tempting…

Thanks,
– pete

http://twitter.com/ethan_rose Ethan Rose

Only problem with that is really that only the 27″ iMac can be used as an external display.

Shrfu31

Yes, there are two ports. There is one port where you can remove the thunderbolt cable. Then, where the power cord cable is, there is a built in thunderbolt cable.

Darren Olstad

Hi Michael, I love the idea of mirroring my MBA to the iMac so that when I’m at home I am on one computer and if I leave I just grab my macbook air and it is EXACTLY the same mirrored version of the imac. Can you elaborate more on this please?